A short note on the accuracy of the discontinuous Galerkin method with reentrant faces

Abstract

We study the convergence of the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method applied to the advection-reaction equation on meshes with reentrant faces. On such meshes, the upwind numerical flux is not smooth, and so the numerical integration of the resulting face terms can only be expected to be first-order accurate. Despite this inexact integration, we prove that the DG method converges with order $\mathcal{O}(h^{p+1/2})$, which is the same rate as in the case of exact integration. Consequently, specialized quadrature rules that accurately integrate the non-smooth numerical fluxes are not required for high-order accuracy. These results are numerically corroborated on examples of linear advection and discrete ordinates transport equations.